Sidney Lumet, 12 Angry Men (1957)
- Sidney Lumet's courtroom drama, 12 Angry Men, depicts the goings-on in a jury room, where twelve men decide the fate of a young man accused of murdering his father. In the course of the afternoon, Henry Fonda builds a liberal-conservative consensus like that in the nation at large, and teaches the other eleven a lesson in civics and in the importance of unity in the face of social change. In the context of the Cold War, Lumet's plea for consensus provides a valuable insight into ways in which both conservative and liberal Americans made connections between internal dissent and external threats. If the American public, as represented by the nameless jury members, could not reach a consensus on domestic disputes, then external enemies--for example the Soviet Union--could conquer a divided nation.
- Questions to Think About:
- 1) Why do none of the people in the film have names?
- 2) How does the Henry Fonda character build consensus? How does that reflect the building of consensus in American Cold War politics?
- 3) What happens to those who resist joining the rest? What does that indicate about intellectual dissent in the 1950s?
- 4) How does 12 Angry Men depict juvenile delinquency and relations between men and their sons? Is this depiction similar to or different from the depictions of this relationship in Rebel Without a Cause?
- 5) 12 Angry Men takes place in an almost entirely male world. What can you derive about the construction and meaning of masculinity in the 1950s from this film?
Further resources and readings:
- IMDB resources for the film.
- Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (1983)
- Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (1982)
Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for HST 622 (Cold War America), at The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Summer Semester 2000. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Tuesday 13 June 2000.